In the east of Serbia in the province of Vojvodina, between the Danube river and the southwestern slope of the Carpathians, there is a large sandy area called Deliblatska peščara (literally Arenal de Deliblato, after the nearby town of that name), which is the largest sandy area in Europe.
It is the remains of an ancient and extensive prehistoric desert that originated from the retreat of the Pannonian Sea, which is sometimes referred to as the European Sahara and it is considered the oldest European desert.
The Pannonian Sea formed about 10 million years ago as one of the many seas into which Paratethys, the great sea that stretched from the Alps to the Aral Sea, was divided in southern Europe.
It existed as an independent sea for about 9 million years, disappearing in the mid-Pleistocene about 600,000 years ago. Its water flowed into the Mediterranean and the area it occupied became a desert.
The Arenal de Deliblato covers an area of 300 square kilometers, where the dunes, which reach between 70 and 200 meters high, have formed elliptical hills, with plains of meadows and steppe forests between them.
The southern part of the sandbank, the one that borders the Danube, is a wetland called Labudovo Okno . It covers about 40 square kilometers and includes marshes, ponds, controls, river islands and the mouth of the Nara River into the Danube, today submerged as a result of the dam of the Puerta de Hierro I hydroelectric power station. .
The sandbank is home to more than 900 plant species, many of which are found nowhere else in the world, and some 200 animal species, including the desert ant (Cataglyphis ), species of which inhabit the Sahara desert but also areas such as southern Russia and southern Spain.
Strong winds and storms used to carry the Deliblato sand up to several thousand kilometers in all directions, especially to the North, like a kind of Central European haze.
For this reason, in 1789 the Austrian empire, to whom the sandy territory belonged and whose Viennese subjects were greatly inconvenienced by sandy blizzards, sent forest engineer Franz Bachofen to carry out a study on the matter.
Bachofen found that the sands covered an area of about 406.60 square kilometers, 168 of which corresponded to loose and free sand. , the culprit of the haze. To combat it, he proposed a reforestation plan, which began to be applied in 1818 and affected almost 300 square kilometers, partially solving the problem.
Because one of the main aspects of the plan was to turn the sandbank into vineyards. Until 1873 there was no house in the area that did not have its own vineyard, so large did the plantations become. However, it soon became clear that growing vines in sandy soil was an arduous task, and little by little the crops were abandoned, leaving vast expanses of empty sand again.
These human actions produced a marked change in the relief and landscape, such that today the area bears little resemblance to a sandy desert.
Interestingly, and as happened with another European desert, Tabernas in Almeria, the Deliblato sandbank became the filming set for numerous films, both national and international, since the 1960s.
Fonts
Deliblato Sands, the European Sahara (Serbia.com Official Website) / Deliblato Sands (Serbia Film Commission) / UNESCO / Wikipedia